Let’s launch a new series of posts. From time to time, I would like to bring a fresh perspective on Householder Enlightenment.

And yes, today, let’s begin with one kind of pressure or ideal that may have been influencing you. Not that becoming co-dependent was ever, necessarily, announced officially as a Perfection Project for you by your parents or lover.

Self-sacrifice can work for Enlightenment only if…

You’re a renunciate on a path to Enlightenment. Or if — phooey on Enlightenment — you just want to be a tragic hero.

Otherwise, no. Codependency does not fit well with householder life.

If you are a renunciate, you don’t officially have a human, individual self. You work towards extinguishing it, like one of those trick birthday candles that can’t be blown out.

As a renunciate, you would keep trying your best by squishing down your personal needs, substituting the official credo or rituals or meditative practices, aiming to do nothing on your own but everything as Divine inspiration.

Sometimes this works. Not often.

Blog-Buddies, I have had the chance to read many auras of people on a reunciate path to Enlightenment — some aura reading for myself, some for clients; some aura reading related to cord-cutting; some aura reading for research for our blog’s own Enlightenment Life List; sometimes doing aura reading from photos during phone sessions of research for clients.

Often these renunciates-in-practice were promised they were actually on a householder path to Enlightenment. Only the trusting spiritual seeker was sadly misinformed and, thus, wound up living the unhappy middle lifestyle, neither fish nor fowl, neither householder or renunciate, and definitely far from Enlightenment still.

Blog-Buddies, I have stopped counting how many folks on a path of renunciation are really miserable.

Or personal development becomes a full-time job, with the habit of fixing, healing, changing themselves all day long.

None of this moves out STUFF in their auras, though all that work sure can keep a person busy.

Your spiritual path does not have to be complicated. It is not required, ever, to lie to yourself. Nor to view your human self as “evil” or “something to overcome.”

Unless your belief system requires belief in a Satan, or there is a true mental health problem, why believe things like “The Devil can make me do bad things, want bad things” etc.?

Helping you to sort out good and bad for yourself, it’s so important to understand that you can become Enlightened as a householder, if you want. Belonging to any organized religion is optional, lovely if you find it helpful, not required if you prefer disorganized religion. Church attendance, in itself, does not bring Enlightenment.

Certainly, being a renunciate is not required for Enlightenment, not if you’re living today.

Householder Enlightenment is not Renunciate Enlightenment

Better get that part straight, clear and sweet and simple.

Do you remember when you first learned about Enlightenment? Assuming that you did, officially, hear about the concept of “Enlightenment” once upon a time…

Probably your introduction came in the context of being a professional holy person, a monk or nun or celibate priest. Being a really good Catholic, how you might advance fastest as a Buddhist or Hindu, what is required of a good Muslim girl or boy, what is really needed for becoming really wise or saintly, etc.

Well, pursuing spiritual goodies as a renunciate is definitely one lifestyle choice a person can make. Such an ideal is hallowed by tales of many great saints, some of whom have been canonized by the Catholic church (like Mother Teresa of Calcutta), some of whom are or were spiritually Enlightened, some of whom have been simultaneously Enlightened and caught up in sex scandals. (If this last notion terrifies you, check out our recent blog thread with several posts and many, many wise Blog-Buddy comments on the topic of gurus gone wrong, etc.)

Then, of course, we have all the householder teachers of Enlightenment and meditation and healing; all the psychics and cult leaders and other people in professional development who aim to help bring about Enlightenment.

These leaders can be effective long before they are personally Enlightened. Or they might be Enlightened and not be particularly good at teaching or healing. Most commonly, there is really colossal confusion about aiming for Householder Enlightenment or Renunciate Enlightenment.

Living now, we are part of a large grouping of souls who have come to earth in order to become Enlightened in this lifetime, and to do it as householders. Some of us are also here as teachers and healers, or even serving as an Enlightenment Coach.

To me, helping people to move into Householder Enlightenment is the happening thing now, just as Elvis Presley helped with a rather different, very important, shift to collective consciousness, back in the day.

There was only one Elvis. Really. Despite those cute professional Elvis impersonators.

By contrast, the shift into Householder Enlightenment has many of us on the task force, and each of us can play a role if we feel like it.

What makes Householder Enlightenment different from the renunciate kind?

You get to have your human identity, your wardrobe, your preferences in food, your independence. You get to have a love life, even a sex life. You may have personal friends.

Also, you can craft your own belief system, not having to be part of a religious or yogic tradition. (Yeah, let’s hear it again for disorganized religion!)

Instead of being self-sacrificing, you can express yourself, enjoying your human life and your human self.

Many technical components to describing and identifying Enlightenment can be different for Householder Enlightenment and Renunciate Enlightenment.

So this whole theme is emerging at this blog. We just slipped into it, as an online community, by surprise. As you can read if you follow the sequence at our popular post called “Surprise, Enlightenment!”

Who really pushes codependency as a spiritual ideal?

Plenty of people, actually. Just one catch. This isn’t necessarily done using the term “codependent.” Which is what makes it tricky.

For example, there is a certain do-gooder feel, even sanctimony, about these interesting experiments for humans:

Here’s the big irony about codependency and Enlightenment

When you give up codependent behavior, you won’t become a miserable sinner who is less evolved that before.

Okay, you might feel a bit miserable for a short time, getting used to life without anticipating wishes of other people.

That’s because all the do-gooding was masking the misery there beneath the surface. Fear not, though. STUFF at an astral and subconscious level is what causes so much of that feeling weird about self and one’s perfectly human reactions and desires.

My favorite motto as an aura healer with skills of Energy Spirituality? “STUFF can always, always, always, always be healed.”

However one goes about it, any skill set to permanently remove STUFF will move you further, faster on your personal path to Enlightenment.

Ironically, co-dependence slows down a path to Enlightenment compared to living without the codependency.

As for confusing empath talent with some sort of sad idea that “If I was born an empath, I must always take on suffering from people.” Really, really pathetic, Blog-Buddies. Just about as pathetic as telling people “If you are born as an empath, you will never be able to turn off doing unskilled empath merges.”

So not true! Any born empath can become a skilled empath. Which makes it way easier not to fall into codependent relationships.

Join the Discussion

I was in a codependent human (rather than spiritual) relationship for a while; ironically, I got into it because I felt more like myself around him. I did wind up working out some issues while in that relationship, but ended up with other issues that took me a long while to extricate myself from, and it’s still an ongoing process.

I do feel that the whole thing was a valuable experience, though; it was everything I thought I wanted in a relationship, so finding out it wasn’t after all what I wanted helped not only with my other human relationships, but also with my spiritual path, which I didn’t really start on in earnest until after the codependent relationship had ceased to be romantic. I wonder if I would have been more prone to spiritual forms of self-sacrifice without the experience. (I used to have literal self-sacrifice fantasies as a child–dying to save someone else.)

When I was in my twenties I was very much into TM and a lot of friends had joined Purusha ( TM renunciates). It was very much my desire and intention to also join Purusha.

Even whilst at medical school I was finding 3 to 4 hours a day to meditate. I was living in a house with other meditators, one of whom was Ro. She is my wife of 27 years. We had shared a house for several years and were “just” good friends.

On August 10th 1983 we had a party. A couple of Indonesian TM teachers, who just happened to be in our area, showed up.

They announced they were palm readers.

So as a fun party trick I let them read my palm. They said,to me, “in a years time you will be married”. Then they read Ros palm. They stated “in a years time you will be married”. We had a quiet laugh as she had just broken up with her long term partner and I commented that I would be on Purusha soon and anyway in a years time I had a medical elective planned for 3 months in Rishikesh….

In this life I stayed at George Harrison’s Bhaktivedanta manor for a weekend.

I chanted with the devotees each morning and recognised many devotees from my previous incarnation in India.

Although I really enjoyed hanging out with them again, I had a clear sense that that there was no need to repeat that experience.

It has however, taken quite a long time for me to let go of the renunciate calling and to relax into living as a married householder.

I can attest to the fact that Rose is very astute in flagging up this dichotomy up as a major issue that can create a subtle, underlying tension in one’s life.

I suspect for those of us, who have had many renunciate incarnations, there can be a strong tendency, this time round, to want to repeat a previous lifetime, rather than getting stuck into a new and very different set of circumstances in this life.

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